Give up, that’s my advice. It’s not reasonable to pretend to use correctly the OT with only 3 weeks of practice, if you come from a laptop background. Not only because of the difficulty to understand the logic of the OT, but also because you cannot simply transpose what you’ve got on your laptop to any machine (OT or other gear) without transforming also, and sometimes deeply, all your set. So, you will have a double work to do: learning the OT AND modifying your set.
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Doable, but you’ll have to change your Mickey gloves : you’ll need 10 fingers. 
As you have different samples on tracks, I’d use Arranger, to avoid mistakes, wrong tempo changes…You can set long loops of patterns and swap to other loops.
In Arranger You can write things in rows as REMinders…
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No matter how you decide to set it up (there are many viable possibilities) - whatever the case with that, you will want to focus the majority of your time on actually practicing the set itself on the OT as your primary goal. In other words, the theory and planning stages and all that are a luxury which you cannot currently afford. You will need to pick the method that sounds easiest and most simple to you - then you need to build that project and start playing it everyday for a good while.
There are many things that happen when operating the OT which you will not forsee until they happen to you, and the only thing that gets you there is good old fashioned practice, practice, practice.
Especially in your case where there is a rapidly approaching deadline for a scheduled gig… all the theory and “perfect scenario” kind of stuff is probably not where you want the focus to be. You need some time to get used to the different kinds of physical hand movements used to control the OT, its not necessarily difficult but its not exactly entirely intuitive either.
Just start playing with it, and allow yourself some room for mistakes. Id suggest going for the quickest possible “workable” solution, and mastering that as much as possible. Once you are done with this event, then you can focus a bit more on learning all the ins and outs and other options.
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Yeah I’m thinking stem playback while tweaking mutes and effects is probably most realistic given the time frame. Best of luck!
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I don’t think this is realistic. I would restore your backups to a new laptop and learn the OT when you have time.
I say this because the OT does not take kindly to just shoving loops in it and playing them back like a good, obedient sampler. It will trick you into manipulating them until they sound nothing like what you put into it.
Unless you’re OK with doing a totally unique, one-off set that will be akin to improv for the tracks you use the OT for, I would go the laptop route. The OT does better as a sample instrument than a loop playback machine.
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I totally respect people’s views but the Octatrack will simply be playing back loops for a number of the tracks, I have a main drum machine, a modular, monosynths and the Beatstep. Surely setting up the Octatrack to playback loops isn’t rocket science? I just want to be able to bring loops in and out at the minute, I am not expecting to be a pro at all plus I have most days free at the minute to work 8 hours a day on it. The gig is actually 3 weeks and 5 days away, I know most of the set very well so I think I can make it
At the minute I am trying to work out whether the best approach is to use a similar pattern idea to the demo whereby I just chop the songs into sections and play combined parts in each pattern or whether I break the songs into 8 parts and then mute and unmute parts as I see fit.
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I did exactly this when I got mine, had a show booked 3 weeks from when it arrived. Wasn’t a masterpiece but I pulled it off. I’d say focus on triggering samples and loops made from other gear or software you already know well, and treat it more like a conventional sampling groovebox - presequence patterns, chain and switch between them on the fly, and just use the fader for controlling effects. If you stick to that stuff it’s actually really, really easy to manage and people will think it’s a lot more impressive than it actually is. Ignore live sampling/resampling, ignore MIDI sequencing, ignore more complicated use of PLocks (plocks are pretty straightorward but once you start adding in one shots and stuff like that it can get more confusing to keep track of everything when you’re playing), don’t mess with things like LFO designer or slides or parts or even slicing, keep all of the patterns the same length, just use it like an Electribe and you should be OK.
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Bounce the audio in each song down to 4 to 7 or 8 stereo stems- 7 if you want to set the 8th OT track as Master- which is recommended for global effects like filter and beat delay effects or master compressor.
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Make each stem exactly 128 measures long, if your song is longer than 128 measures, break each stem into devisions of 128 measure audio files. This will allow you to quickly use the sample start parameter to choose which measure to play on which stem. (since this value is from 0 to 127)
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Load all of your stems into the static machine’s project audio pool. Trigger these stems on patterns in a bank, just one trig on the first step per track is needed using this method, hold the step down and turn the STRT parameter to parameter lock the measure. You can use the pattern scale options (func+page) to make the pattern slower to have a single pattern contain a larger or smaller portion of the song.
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Bonus: create one last stem that contains a bunch of hits from the song, 1 hit per measure- Drum samples, chords, etc etc that can be used for fills, live playing, or variations of the song. You can p-lock which stem to play from the pool.
Using this method you can either sequence all of your patterns in song mode, or cue the patterns live, as well as mute / unmute parts, use the fader on effects, trigger pieces of the bonus stem, beat delay, etc etc, live. You are limited to 128 stems loaded into the current project, so if you exceed this number in stems, you’ll need to load up another porject in the middle of your set. 8 songs = 16 stems per song.
Edit: Oh and you still have 8 MIDI tracks, and if you keep the stems under 7 tracks, you can use the stereo inputs as another audio track, to add effects on external gear or route it to the master compressor if enabling the 8th track as master setting.
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Check ask.audio tutorial!!!
He could just do a one shot trig you don’t have to mess with the pattern length can edit it in the audio editor to make sure it’s in time
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Great idea but I know for me personally arranger was the last thing I tackled learning lol
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Yes that is a good solution. I just found myself worrying all the time about my one shots being armed or not when doing a full live set. I’d rather have a long patterns instead of flying all over the patterns to confirm the right trigs are armed. If you set off the wrong one you could have the wrong pad going off for 30 secs unless you quickly lower the volume or just stop the track. Real messy. Each to his own though!
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New Os FIRST TRC will be safer, but will it be released (very) soon ?
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If you choose to go for an OT solution, I think you should get enough info above.
Work on what seems to be the simplest one.
Get familiar with Banks / Parts and save often your Parts.
And practice a loooooooot !
Only way to identify the areas where OT get weird and be familiar with the surroundings…
Youve got brass balls for pulling it off, I hope this guy pulls through with it. I think its doable bit a bit flukey. Three weeks in with OT I was getting to grips with it but I definitely still found myself at silence trying to find what was wrong with it, often resulting in a reboot and a fresh project. If it goes tits up play it into the set, “Hello (insert city)! Is everyone having a good time tonight?!” While your sweating bullets frantically trying to fix the fuck up
I honestly wish you the best though OP but id rather you than me, This might not be the best idea but if you have a lot of free time and really work hard you can do it. Follow the thread! Search anything you dont understand. There should be an elektron crash course like those one week driving schools, granted they put risky unreliable drivers on the road but ill be damned if they aint driving
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Yeah agreed, don’t waste time with the other tutorials online, they are generally good, but nowhere near as methodical and easy to absorb than the ask audio tutorial
Thanks for all the advice and help guys, it’s so very appreciated. My head is kind of sore from all the reading and video watching I’ve done today. I seem to be watching a lot of content which ends up discussing audio manipulation, sampling etc… on the OT. A lot of topics which aren’t necessarily what i should be focusing on right now.
Just to be clear I will have all of the loops prepared and at the correct tempo prior to loading them in to the OT. Right now it is just going to be a playback machine though I’d like to dabble with scenes and have been looking in to this as well.
One very basic thing that I still have found out yet is the best method at this stage of moving through all of my loops as the tracks progress. I understand that I can have 128 samples and 80mb of audio loops when using the flex machine, which should be fine, but I don’t understand how I change what is playing on the 8 tracks seamlessly. By that I mean, if I have the 8 tracks filled with a few drum loops and pads but then need to move on to different drum loops and pads for the next section of the song, is that simple enough?
I feel like I have learnt a good bit today but a lot of it deals with things like playing chromatically and things like that, techniques which are further down the line yet my basic knowledge is still blurry.
I am seriously thinking about buying the ask.audio tutorial and working my way through that. There are no reviews of it on the site, is it clear and concise? Will it be a good help? I sure hope so lol
Thanks again everyone!!!
Edit… (as I ran out of posts lol)
Ok, so I just got to the chapter in the manual discussing “banks, parts and scenes.” Clearly I don’t understand these terms yet and hopefully my eyes will soon be opened. Not tonight though as I’m literally falling asleep in bed as I try to read some more.
Little bit stressed out but very excited to finally get to know this wonderful machine 
Thanks man. It was a pretty small show (40 people tops) or I wouldn’t have risked it.
Thinking about it now, I’d say the single most important thing that made it work out for me was that I didn’t go in to it with any material or ideas that I’d worked on before I got the OT, and just crammed for maybe 8 or 9 hours a day for three days over the last two weekends before the show writing a short (25 minutes or so) set of all new material. It wasn’t the greatest stuff I’ve ever done and I wouldn’t’ play any of it again but since I wrote it while I was learning and learned by writing it, it was all tailored exactly to what I actually knew how to do. I think translating existing stuff over to an OT set would be a lot harder (I’ve never tried that, I just write new stuff for whatever setup I happen to have at the time) . So I guess my other advice would be "write material by playing, instead of trying to learn to play the material you write, because three weeks is probably not enough time to learn how to pull off that second option.
EDIT: also,
-Nothing is a mistake if you do it three times in a row
-If you just go for it and give no fucks no matter what happens, people will usually respond well to that. The best shows I’ve seen are almost always the ones where something went completely wrong and the performer(s) just went with it.
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3 weeks is pretty rough tbh.
The best approach would be to recreate your songs in the OT with short loops and one shots. This gives you a lot of flexibility but ultimately requires the most brain power and familiarity with the box.
The other way is with one shot trigs of complete track stems. This is very achievable in this time frame and you would simply focus on performing with the other aspects of your setup such as synths etc.
Good luck!
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Bank is a container of 4 Parts, 16 Scenes, and 16 Patterns.
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Part is the container of all of the settings of all 8 tracks (track type,
sample pool assignment, effect inserts, levels, etc) -
Pattern is everything you edit/record into the sequencer as well as the part number the pattern is on. For each pattern, you can assign one of the 4 parts, by default all patterns in the bank are assigned to part #1.
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A Scene is a container of mappings for the crossfader. For each scene you can assign many parameters so when you move the crossfader it will gradually go to the value you mapped. The Crossfader fades between two Scenes- the two selected scenes are called Slots A and B. By default, the Bank has the A-Slot (button to the left of the crossfader) assigned to scene 1, and the B-Slot (button to the right of the crossfader) assigned to Scene 9. You can hold the button down and it will highlight which Scene is currently active on the slot. To assign values to the Scene- keep the button A-Slot or B-Slot depressed and move some knobs and change some values, they will be mapped to the current Scene of that Slot.
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